"Misinterpreting Copyright — A Series of Errors" (~2002) identifies and corrects a sequence of mistakes that stallman argues have led to the expansion of copyright far beyond its original justification and into a form that actively harms the public interest. The essay is part of stallman's ongoing engagement with copyright law as a political and legal instrument.
The "series of errors" in the title refers to a chain of reasoning: starting from a misunderstanding of copyright's purpose, legislators and courts have made one wrong turn after another, extending copyright terms, expanding its scope, and strengthening its enforcement — each step flowing from the previous one, all of them compounding the original mistake.
The original mistake, stallman argues, is treating copyright as a natural right of creators rather than as a social bargain in which the public grants temporary monopoly rights in exchange for the eventual enrichment of the public domain. The US Constitution's copyright clause specifies the purpose explicitly: "to promote the progress of science and useful arts." This is an instrumental, public-interest justification — not a recognition of creators' inherent rights. When copyright is treated as a creator's natural right, every extension and every strengthening of enforcement seems obvious; when it is treated as a public bargain, every extension requires justification in terms of public benefit.
stallman applies this analysis to several specific issues: the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (which extended copyright terms retroactively, enriching no new creators but transferring value from the public domain to existing rightholders); the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (which restricted activities that were legal under copyright but threatened digital distribution models); and the general trend toward treating copyright enforcement as the primary goal of copyright policy rather than as a means toward public benefit.
The essay connects to did-you-say-intellectual-property in its critique of the discourse around copyright and to copyleft-pragmatic-idealism in its argument that copyleft is a use of copyright that serves copyright's original purpose — promoting the progress of knowledge — better than conventional proprietary copyright does.